1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a communication support apparatus, a communication support method, and a computer program product for supporting communication by performing translation between a plurality of languages.
2. Description of the Related Art
Recently, an opportunity of interlingual communication has been increased because of growing globalization, development of a computer network technology, or the like. On the other hand, a machine translation device for translating any text written in Japanese, for example, to a text in another language such as in English, is developed and put to practical use, with the development in natural language processing technology.
Further with the development in speech processing technology, a speech synthesis device for transforming a natural language string existing as electronic data into a speech output, and a speech input device, which enables an input of the natural language string by speech, by string transforming a speech by a user are put into practical use.
With such development in the natural language processing technology and the speech processing technology, it is highly expected to integrate these technologies together, thereby realizing a communication supporting apparatus for supporting a communication between those whose mother tongues are different.
To realize a robust machine translation, a grammar rule capable of covering a wide range of language phenomena, a large-scale word dictionary, translation knowledge, or the like are required. Further especially, in order to realize a translation device allowing a free speech, it is indispensable to solve a variety of language phenomena, which affects a translation result, represented by a non-grammaticality such as inversion and abbreviation, in addition to problems such as polysemy and ambiguity occurring even in a speech restricted to some extent. As described above, a realization of the translation device capable of processing a variety of user speech robustly, and having a highly accurate translation performance is a very hard subject.
In order to realize a highly accurate translation, technology, in which a sentence paraphrased to facilitate the translation from an input sentence, is offered to a user, and a translation process is executed to a sentence selected by the user, is suggested in Published International Application No. WO 00/13102 A1.
In general, if the translation process itself is failed, or only a partial translation is obtained by the translation process, so that speech content of the user is not correctly transmitted to a target language speaker, the user indicates re-input or re-process to the translation machine in order to try the translation process again.
However, since the translation machine generally outputs the same translation result by executing the re-input or re-process of the same speech, there has been a problem that the speech content is never correctly transmitted. Further in order to avoid the problem and to output a different translation result, the user had to express the content to be transmitted by using another expression within a source language, and if possible, the user had to re-input another expression after estimating a sentence translatable by the translation machine.
In the method in Published International Application No. WO 00/13102 A1, a paraphrase sentence is offered before the translation process. However, the user cannot consider what kind of sentence is translatable by the translation machine, or what was wrong with the last speech content to fail in translation. Therefore, the user can never assume or speak an input sentence that enables correct translation by the translation machine.